I dropped the sack of potatoes and ran round to the front of the barn. There, I came to a sudden halt, hardly able to believe what I was seeing.
Ellie was standing about twenty paces away, holding both her arms out, screaming and screaming as if she were being tortured. At her feet lay Jack, blood all over his face. I thought Ellie was screaming because of Jack – but no, it was because of Snout.
He was facing towards me, as if he were waiting for me to arrive. In his left hand he was holding his favourite sharp knife, the long one he always used to cut a pig’s throat. I froze in horror because I knew what I’d heard in Ellie’s scream.
With his right arm, he was cradling her baby.
There was thick pig blood on Snout’s boots and it was still dripping onto them from his apron. He moved the knife closer to the baby.
‘Come here, boy,’ he called in my direction. ‘Come to me.’ Then he laughed.
His mouth had opened and closed as he spoke but it wasn’t his voice that came out. It was Mother Malkin’s. Neither was it his usual deep belly-rumble of laughter. It was the cackle of the witch.
I took a slow step towards Snout. Then another one. I wanted to get closer to him. I wanted to save Ellie’s baby. I tried to go faster. But I couldn’t. My feet felt as heavy as lead. It was like desperately trying to run in a nightmare. My legs were moving as if they didn’t belong to me.
I suddenly realized something that brought me out in a cold sweat. I wasn’t just moving towards Snout because I wanted to. It was because Mother Malkin had summoned me. She was drawing me towards him at the pace she wanted, drawing me towards his waiting knife. I wasn’t going to the rescue. I was just going to die. I was under some sort of spell. A spell of compulsion.
I’d felt something similar down by the river, but just in time my left hand and arm had acted by themselves to knock Mother Malkin into the water. Now my limbs were as powerless as my mind.
I was moving closer to Snout. Closer and closer to his waiting knife. His eyes were the eyes of Mother Malkin, and his face was bulging horribly. It was as if the witch inside were distorting its shape, swelling the cheeks close to bursting, bulging the eyes close to popping, beetling the brow into craggy overhanging cliffs; below them the bulbous, protruding eyes centred with fire, casting a red, baleful glow before them.
I took another step and felt my heart thud. Another step and it thudded again. I was much nearer to Snout by now.
When I was no more than five paces from the waiting knife, I heard Alice running towards us, screaming my name. I saw her out of the corner of my eye, moving out of the darkness into the glow from the fire. She was heading straight towards Snout, her black hair streaming back from her head as if she were running directly into a gale.
Without even breaking her stride, she kicked towards Snout with all her might. She aimed just above his leather apron, and I watched the toe of her pointy shoe disappear so deeply into his fat belly that only the heel was visible.
Snout gasped, doubled over and dropped Ellie’s baby, but, lithe like a year-old cat, Alice dropped to her knees and caught her just before she hit the ground. Then she spun away, running back towards Ellie.
At the very moment that Alice ’s pointy shoe touched Snouf’s belly, the spell was broken. I was free again. Free to move my own limbs. Free to move. Or free to attack.
Snout was almost bent in two but he straightened back up, and although he’d dropped the baby, he was still holding the knife. I watched as he moved it towards me. He staggered a bit too – perhaps he was dizzy, or maybe it was just a reaction to Alice ’s pointy shoe.
Free of the spell, a whole range of feelings surged up inside me. There was sorrow for what had been done to Jack, horror at the danger Ellie’s baby had been in and anger that this could happen to my family. And in that moment I knew that I was born to be a spook. The very best spook who’d ever lived. I could and would make Mam proud of me.
You see, rather than being filled with fear, I was all ice and fire. Deep inside I was raging, full of hot anger that was threatening to explode. While on the outside I was as cold as ice, my mind sharp and clear, my breathing slow.
I thrust my hands into my breeches pockets. Then I brought them out fast, each fist full of what it had found there, and hurled each handful straight at Snout’s head, something white from my right hand and something dark from my left. They came together, a white and a black cloud, just as they struck his face and shoulders.
Salt and iron – the same mixture so effective against a boggart. Iron to bleed away its strength; salt to burn it. Iron filings from the edge of the old bucket and salt from Mam’s kitchen store. I was just hoping that it would have the same effect on a witch.
I suppose having a mixture like that thrown into your face wouldn’t do anybody much good – at the very least it would make you cough and splutter – but the effect on Snout was much worse than that. First he opened his hand and let the knife fall. Then his eyes rolled up into his head and he pitched slowly forward, down onto his knees. Then he hit his forehead very hard on the ground and his face twisted to one side.
Something thick and slimy began to ooze out of his left nostril. I just stood there watching, unable to move as Mother Malkin slowly bubbled and twisted from his nose into the shape that I remembered. It was her all right, but some of her was the same while other bits were different.
For one thing, she was less than a third of the size she’d been the last time I saw her. Now her shoulders were hardly past my knees, but she was still wearing the long cloak, which was trailing on the ground, and the grey and white hair still fell onto her hunched shoulders like mildewy curtains. It was her skin that was really different. All glistening, strange and sort of twisted and stretched. However, the red eyes hadn’t changed, and they glared at me once before she turned and began to move away towards the corner of the barn. She seemed to be shrinking even more and I wondered if that was the salt and iron still having an effect. I didn’t know what more I could do, so I just stood there watching her go, too exhausted to move.
Alice wasn’t having that. By now she’d handed the baby to Ellie and she came running across and made straight for the fire. She picked up a piece of wood that was burning at one end, then ran at Mother Malkin, holding it out in front of her.
I knew what she was going to do. One touch and the witch would go up in flames. Something inside me couldn’t let that happen because it was too horrible, so I caught Alice by the arm as she ran past and spun her round so that she dropped the burning log.
She turned on me, her face full of fury, and I thought I was about to feel a pointy shoe. Instead, she gripped my forearm so tightly that her fingernails actually bit deep into the flesh.
‘Get harder or you won’t survive!’ she hissed into my face. ‘Just doing what Old Gregory says won’t be enough. You’ll die like the others!’
She released my arm and I looked down at it and saw beads of blood where her nails had cut into me.
‘You have to burn a witch,’ Alice said, the anger in her voice lessening, ‘to make sure they don’t come back. Putting them in the ground ain’t no good. It just delays things. Old Gregory knows that but he’s too soft to use burning. Now it’s too late…’
Mother Malkin was disappearing round the side of the barn into the shadows, still shrinking with each step, her black cloak trailing on the ground behind her.
It was then that I realized the witch had made a big mistake. She’d taken the wrong route, right across the largest pigpen. By now she was small enough to fit under the lowest plank of wood.
The pigs had had a very bad day. Five of their number had been slaughtered and it had been a very noisy, messy business that had probably scared them pretty badly. So they weren’t best pleased, to say the least, and it probably wasn’t a good time to go into their pen. And big hairy pigs will eat anything, anything at all. Soon it was Mother Malkin’s turn to scream and it went on for a long time.
‘Could be as good as burning, that,’ said Alice, when the sound finally faded away. I could see the relief in her face. I felt the same. We were both glad it was all over. I was tired, so I just shrugged, not sure what to think, but I was already looking back towards Ellie and I didn’t like what I saw.
Ellie was frightened, and she was horrified. She was looking at us as if she couldn’t believe what had happened and what we’d done. It was as if she’d seen me properly for the first time. As if she’d suddenly realized what I was.
I understood something too. For the first time I really felt what it was like to be the Spook’s apprentice. I’d
